himself up. There ain’t no parts of the country now where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he’s got nine-fifty in that valise it’s a ninety-eight-cent Waterbury that’s stopped at ten minutes to ten.”

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra-rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural, that even a shellgame man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.

Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more exhumed his roll of yellowbacks from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.

“Son,” said he, “run somewhere and get this changed for me. I’m mighty nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you’ll get a nickel if you’ll hurry up.”

A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy’s face.

“Aw, watchert’ink! G’wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. Dey ain’t no farm clothes yer got on. G’wan wit yer stage money.”

On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.

“Mister,” said the rural one. “I’ve heard of places in this here town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10? I’m goin’ to have some sport, and then maybe I’ll buy out a business of some kind.”

The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left forefinger nail.

“Cheese it, old man,” he murmured reproachfully. “The Central Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You couldn’t get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.”

Rebuffed again by the great city that is so swift to detect artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the kerb and presented his thoughts to hold a conference.

“It’s my clothes,” said he; “durned if it ain’t. They think I’m a hayseed and won’t have nothin’ to do with me. Nobody never made fun of this hat in Ulster Country. I guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you must dress up like they do.”

So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.

At nine o’clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Ulster Country would have forsworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat the latest block. His light grey trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English walking-coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.